We, the oceanographers, like to get up from the water by all means… We have already presented you the rosettes, but now it’s time for the pumps! Far from giving you a lecture on the different types of pumps, but we have had to test several of them to fill 1000L drums for Beryllium 7 […]
To tell the truth, we didn’t enter the port of Durban (South Africa), but we stayed offshore, about 4 km from the entrance to the port. The reason for our stopover was the essential need to retrieve the work equipment of Heather and Tommy, our South African colleagues, equipment that had become stuck on the […]
Trichodesmium is a fascinating phytoplankton for oceanographers. Discovered in the mid-1960s, it has the particularity of capturing atmospheric nitrogen, a process called nitrogen fixation. As the atmosphere is an almost unlimited reservoir of nitrogen (80%), this capacity is a real advantage in subtropical waters, which are very poor in alternative nitrogen sources. A few days […]
We have just arrived at our third station, off the coast of South Africa! On the program, 24 hours or almost 24 hours of water collection of all kinds: standard and “clean” CTD rosette, in-situ pumps, mini coring machine.Over the next 4 stations, we will deploy everything to track the Agulhas current and quantify the […]
A “test” station is made to… test everything: the devices that will be launched, but also the fluidity of the operations, the organisation of the research teams and the experiments in the labs. Since Wednesday 13 at the end of the day, the ship is full of knowledge, for the scientists, the crew, but also […]
After months of preparation and two days of mobilization, we left this morning at 7:30 a.m., with a certain emotion present on all decks.The dolphins accompanied us as soon as we left the port. On the way, since this morning, we have made tests of “fish”, a small torpedo that we drag on the side […]
A “mobilization”, in the oceanographic language, it is the installation of the cruise on board of the research vessel. That is, the distribution of 22 tones of material and 48 scientists in more than 15 small laboratories from bottom to top of the ship. There are even collectors of dust and rains all in top, […]
Major French contribution to the international GEOTRACES program SWINGS involves 80 scientists (19 international laboratories, 6 countries).